


Budding

by zenstrike



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Angst, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Pregnancy, Romance, that baby is keith, they made a baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 02:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14990987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Snapshots of growing and growth: Krolia and Keith’s father navigate distance, difference, and family.





	Budding

**Author's Note:**

> i had feels

A stirring woke her, early in the morning with his arm slung over her hips and one of hers stuck under his head. They slept so close she was soaked with his sweat and tangled in his bed sheets and all this was—good, and becoming familiar. But he stirring, the slight rumble above her pelvis, or maybe between her hips— Krolia blinked. Frowned. Rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

It was so early the sun was barely up. Still, she felt it.

She waited for the fear to come. Maybe anger. It wasn’t an impossible thing, or a thing she had never wondered at.  _ This is how I will be _ , she had thought with tight lips and clenched fists.  _ I don’t want to be that. _ She wasn’t. What she felt was—lingering memories of touches and warmth and the feel of him between her thighs and his breath on her cheeks and his laugh in her ears.

Krolia untangled their legs and slipped out of the bed, hovering and feeling like her own body was suddenly alien. She set a gentle, nervous hand over her belly. A stirring indeed, a little biological signal to her brain like a jolt to her spine. Finally she looked back at the sleeping shape of the father of her child, and sighed.

* * *

“We’re not even the same species,” he said later, peeling an egg. He spoke with awe, rather than shame, and Krolia loved him.

* * *

There were many similarities, Krolia learned, between human and galran pregnancies. She was surprised, however, to learn that humans lacked the stirring that she had been warned of from a young age.

“It’s actually really hard to tell for weeks,” he told her, with a shrug. He crouched so he was eye to eye with her belly and Krolia sighed. “Hello in there!”

“Don’t do that,” she said.

He grinned up at her.

It should have seemed unfair: here was something so new, a distance just crossed. Instead, it was natural and warm and Krolia thought she understood, perfectly, what love felt like. He kissed her and said “we’re a family, now,” and she threw her head back and laughed and he kissed her neck.

”Should we get married?” he asked, and she laughed again.

* * *

He brought her a ring and kissed her cheek and made promises to her. Krolia realized late, and with pleasure, that this was part of the human custom and when she said this he tilted his head and made a small o-shape with his mouth. Understanding mingled with confusion and the little thing growing inside her danced.

So she painted her marks onto his cheeks and he painted a copy of his scar above her eye and she echoed his promises and then he was hers, all over again, body and soul.

What a gift it was, to crash.

* * *

If Krolia was at home, her mother and her aunts and her uncles would crowd her for the first month and pepper her with thoughts, and predictions, and ask: “Are you certain? Are you certain you can mother this child?”

If Krolia was at home, she would say:  _ yes _ . It was enough to imagine the faces of her distant (gone) family, and imagine the pleasure of a superstition—a ceremony—completed.

* * *

 

She thought about her childhood as her child grew. She told it stories, whispered in the night when its stirring and its growing kept her awake while its father slept peacefully next to her.

She told it of the Empire, of the stories of her youth ( _ a strike to the heart, a certainty of bravery—the yelmar that cantered across the stars, laying a path for the hopeful to follow—the dreams of the Blade, of the silent war her child would never see _ ). She was so full of hope. 

She stood before the Blue Lion and, lacking a belief in anything greater than  _ this _ , asked it to bless her child with luck and her husband with a long life. 

Hope.

* * *

She craved the food of her childhood: the sweetness of the juicy vorian, plucked from the towering trees of the colony she’d grown up on; the chilled spice cakes her mother would cook before the illness that came and swept her away; the gruel that was a staple of Blade bases, and the camaraderie that sweetened it.

He brought her apples, and the intention was close enough.

 

* * *

If Krolia was at home, she’d retreat to her safest place and curl around her belly and whisper promises to her child. The more wishes a mother made, the safer her baby.

She did this as her belly swelled and studied the desert around them.

When the time came, her community was a single human man and the baby they had made together and that was all she really needed.

* * *

“He needs out,” she sighed, exhaustion and pain making her body heavy.

Her husband turned to her, smiling and cradling the little pale boy in his arms. His hair, shock black like his father’s, and his cheeks round and flushed—Krolia thought she had done a pretty good job. She smiled back.

“What do you mean?”

She looked beyond him to the open window and at the slowly setting sun. “Fresh air and warm light,” she repeated like a chant. And it was a mantra burned into her mind from years of learning and growing and bearing a uterus. Everyone knew what a baby needed. “We’ll name him in the light.” She struggled out of bed, ignored her aches, and held out her arms.

“If you say so,” her child’s father said with a shake of his head, and her child was placed back into her waiting arms.

* * *

 

 

“Keith,” she whispered to his sleeping face. “Keith.”

Say a baby’s name enough and they’ll never forget this first, ultimate gift from their parents. For Keith, from his father. She hoped he carried it like a warmth and a promise of love through all of his days.

It wasn’t even her gift, or her promise. Hers was a blade, sharp and secret. And distance uncrossed.


End file.
